Network Solutions announced today that its launched a its free whois app for the iphone.

First the official announcement then my comments and comparison other free whois apps currently available

“””The app developed by Network Solutions allows iPhone users to use the company’s WHOIS database search tool from anywhere their iPhones receive service. The application will be particularly useful to Web designers, developers, and network engineers on the go.

“””Available now at the iTunes® store online, the WHOIS allows users to easily look up information on the domain or IP of their choice, finding all relevant information, including the WHOIS business listing.”””

“”””Network Solutions has been working with the WHOIS database since its inception,” said Kamalesh Dwivedi, Network Solutions CIO. “The addition of this mobile capability follows the release of the WHOIS lookup mobile application for Google’s Android operating system earlier this year. Extending this capability to the iPhone platform will benefit users in a major way.”””

Ok so much for the official announcement.

Now for the reality check.

NSI application doesn’t hold a candle to two other free whois apps, already available on the Apple App store.

For one the NSI app doesn’t make available the soft key .com button on the iphone, so for every domain you check on the NSI app you have to type in the domain, change from the letter screen to the symbol screen to get the “.” then switch back to the letter screen to type in the “com”.

Both, The Easydns app available for free from the Apple App store and the “Free Whois” app make use of the .com button.

The NSI App uses black and white fonts, nothing special there.

Finally the NSI APP doesn’t seem to work.

On 5 trys I only got whois results back 1 of the 5 domains that are clearly registered.

Freewhois App returns results in colors, much easier on the eyes and even better the domain name, and the servers in the whois record are both clickable so if you want to check out what is on the domain you just looked up, you just click on the link and it takes you there.

The only draw back to the FreeWhois App is that the font is pretty small on the imput side.

EasyDNS App is better than NSI, it uses the “.com” button nicely and results are returned quickly, but once again in black and white and without links.

So I declare the FreeWhois App the winner.

The question I have Is how could a company the size of NSI come out with an App inferior to existing products.

When you see what other companies have produced, how can you put out a product which not only fails to improve on what’s already out, but fails to even match existing products, it just blows my mind.

About Michael Berkens

Michael Berkens, Esq. is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of TheDomains.com. Michael is also the co-founder of Worldwide Media Inc. which sold around 70K domain to Godaddy.com in December 2015 and now owns around 8K domain names . Michael was also one of the 5 Judges selected for the the Verisign 30th Anniversary .Com contest.

Comments

The easyWhois App output now contains a link to the website in question. At the moment, it loads inside the app window, I’d prefer to launch an external browser window for it, but that will require a version upgrade and it takes Apple about 2 to 3 weeks to approve revisions these days.

Our app was also released with a bug in that you cannot enter 3rd level domains, like example.co.uk. We’ve already submitted the fix for that, we await Apple approval.

The currently released version of the Network Solutions WHOIS iPhone application was published to the App Store in early June and is built on the 2.x SDK, which didn’t allow for us to make use of the URL/phone highlighting. We’ve submitted an update to the application which is built using the 3.x SDK and it has both support for .com soft key and URL/phone link highlighting. (We also made a few minor cosmetic improvements.)

We look forward to continuing to improve our iPhone application and appreciate the candid feedback.

Regarding the reported issues with the results, our iPhone application just uses our publicly available WHOIS API (the same one used by http://www.networksolutions.com/whois/index.jsp), so we can troubleshoot any particular problems with look-ups via that web page. As we’re looking to provide quality WHOIS lookups, we would be interested to know about the queries that produced unexpected results.